


Sleeping Giants

by petrichor (findingkairos)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Clan Politics, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Limited POV Narrators, Platonic Relationships, Reincarnation, Strong Female Characters, political manipulation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:40:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26532265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/petrichor
Summary: Namikaze Minato wants to be Hokage because he wants people of the village to acknowledge him -him, a clanless kid in a village that values its clans. It's a journey full of good friends, bad jokes, long talks about infrastructure and urban planning, pets, not-pet animal companions, just a little murder, and a lot of political maneuvering masterminded by his genin teammate Nara Toshiko.So, you know. The usual stuff. Minato can practically feel the Hokage hat on top of his head.
Relationships: Jiraiya & Namikaze Minato
Comments: 28
Kudos: 165





	1. Team Seven

**Author's Note:**

> ( _this is for you_ — hold my hand and we’ll make it through)
> 
> Tags will be updated as we go. Rating will not go above Teen. This is a story about friendship, friendship during war, growing up, maturity, and emotional maturity; along with religion, politics, the nature of humanity, the art of perception, and just how many cats you can fit into someone's shirt. Among other things.

“Team Seven: Namikaze Minato, Yamanaka Hitoshi, and Nara Toshiko.”

Minato glanced around. Yamanaka Hitoshi was a quiet boy in the back of the class, mid- to upper-ranking. He had the Yamanaka standard taijutsu and genin-level clan ninjutsu. Nara Toshiko was mid- to lower-ranking, but she had that uncanny ability to fall asleep anywhere, everywhere. She only got up to fend off any traps or pranks that the teachers or classmates pulled on her before going back to sleep. Both of them were branch members of their respective clans.

They didn’t make faces at getting paired with him, the rookie of the year. Kushina-chan waw going on and on again about how she would _show all of you up, dattebayo!_ But it was a little hard to concentrate on that when Nara Toshiko opened one eye and blinked sleepily at him.

That was normal. Nara were known to be lazy for a reason. But there was a glint there – almost too quick, if Minato hadn’t already been looking in her direction he would have missed it – before she turned away.

The Academy sensei dismissed the newly formulated teams one by one as the jounin sensei showed up. They had Jiraiya, taught by the Sandaime Hokage, who was already famous as part of Team Hiruzen. Rookie of the year and two clan kids.

“It’s a political match,” Yamanaka said as soon as they sat down together, waiting for Jiraiya to show up. Half the class was gone already, picked up by their new sensei. And apparently they were doing this now, okay.

“Of course it is,” Nara said, and cracked her neck. Lazily. Predatorily.

Yamanaka gave her a dirty glare and didn’t seem to notice. “If you try and pull the shit you did in the Academy, I’m going to make you regret it. I won’t have you ruining my chances of promotion just because you’re feeling lazy.”

Nara had pillowed her head on her arms again, but she opened an eye and met Yamanaka’s without flinching. “Pull what?”

“You kept your scores at a very precise 13 out of 100,” Minato pitched in, because Yamanaka was right, and he wasn’t a clan kid. He was an orphan, and if he washed out of the shinobi corps then he had nowhere else left to go. His status as rookie of the year and the acknowledgement of how fast he learned – ridiculous, anyone could do it, Minato was just faster at picking things up than most people – would mean _shit_.

Clan kids had it better. They _always_ had it better. Minato buried the familiar bitterness. “Through the entire year. You calculated each and every move you made, every test, every assessment, down to the last point.”

“Well, of course I did. Being recognized as a genius or a prodigy is troublesome, as I’m sure you know, Namikaze-san.”

“Well, I won’t stand for it.” Yamanka had stood up and he was pointing imperiously at Nara now, eyes wild. Was he using a clan technique? Minato spread out his chakra to check. The Academy sensei weren’t doing anything, just watching. “So pull your weight or wash out, Nara.”

“Can’t do that,” Nara replied, and yawned. Wide, and loud, and definitely unlike the civilian-born and orphan girls in class who worried about appearance and covered their mouths whenever they ate or yawned. It showed off teeth. “Wash out, I mean. But do try and keep up then, Yamanaka Hitoshi, hm? You did ask for it.”

“What?!”

Nara got up. “You make a terrible sensor. You too, Namikaze. Come on. Our new sensei is waiting on the roof.”

Then she leapt out the window like she hadn’t just spent the last fifteen minutes sprawled bonelessly over her desk like she couldn’t care less about getting into the genin corps. Yamanaka stared after her, eyes bulging, jaw dropping. Minato felt about the same way, though he had more dignity than that.

“Let’s go,” he said in lieu of advice or platitudes, and followed Nara out the window.

It turned out that she was right. Jiraiya was standing on the roof, larger than life, his hair a lion’s mane that spilled over his shoulders and down his back messily. His fingers were stained with ink and there was a faint smear of it on his jaw curving up towards his cheekbone, as if he’d absentmindedly scratched at his face in the middle of kanji practice. Standard jounin flak vest and gear, geta shoes.

His voice boomed when he spoke and his eyes were shrewd. He was most interested in Minato for some reason, who appreciated it because it was the opportunity for more.

“Tell me about yourselves,” Jiraiya said when Yamanaka had finally followed them out and when he looked like he’d been expanding with hot hair, about to give someone a tongue lashing. “Your name, your age, likes, dislikes, dreams, fears.”

Was this how new teams usually met? Minato was newly minted with a shiny new headband, he had no frame of reference.

Yamanaka went first. “My name is Yamanaka Hitoshi. I’m eleven. I like success. I don’t teammates who don’t pull their weight. I want to be the youngest jounin ever promoted. Fears…” For the first time in this little speech, Yamanaka hesitated. “Failure, I suppose.”

A truthful half-answer. Any good ninja feared failure. Jiraiya’s expression didn’t change. “Blondie, you next.”

“Namikaze Minato. I’m eleven years old, and I like reading. I don’t like rude market stall owners. My dream is that I want everyone in the village to acknowledge me and become a great Hokage. My fear is that I won’t reach my dreams before I die.”

There was something in Jiraiya’s face. Curiosity, maybe. Minato knew what the village said about him, an orphan clanless boy who had the kind of genius that only came around once in a generation. (He maintained that he wasn’t ‘full of himself’ like some of the Uchiha or Hyuuga liked to say. It was, legitimately, what the village said about him.)

Nara was staring at him, though, and her expression was even harder to read than the jounin Jiraiya’s. She only started speaking after Yamanaka growled deep in his throat – teammates, right. “My name is Nara Toshiko. I’m ten years old. I like learning new things, and I don’t like boring things. My dream is to retire with all my limbs intact. I don’t fear anything.”

Silence. Then, “Anything?” from a thoughtful Jiraiya.

Nara shrugged. “We’re all mortal. Whatever I’m afraid of will die eventually, too. So why be afraid of it?”

Well, that was certainly one way to look at things.

Jiraiya told them to come to Training Ground Three at five in the morning the next day for a test. Then he disappeared in a swirl of leaves. Yamanaka muttered angrily under his breath. Nara just snorted. “Typical dramatic jounin.”

“Don’t be late,” Yamanaka threatened, switching his glare from Nara to Minato. Excuse him. Who did he think he was? (A kid with the backing of the clans, that’s what. He’d go home to warmth and a cooked meal and a roof over his head, always, and never understand just how lucky he was.)

Yamanaka left. Nara sighed and got up, dusting off her long cargo pants. “Well? Where do you live, Namikaze?”

Minato blinked, caught flat-footed. “The eastern residential district.”

“Ah. Not too far then. Let’s walk and talk, shall we?”

Confused, bemused, Minato followed his newest teammate – the one who wasn’t aggressively gunning for jounin and thought Minato and his Hokage dream a barrel of laughs and an insult to the shinobi name – off the roof.

Nara didn’t make much conversation. That was fine with Minato; he found out a lot of things about her by observation. The orphanage workers had called it creepy, but nevertheless the facts stood: there was a lot to learn about someone when they were walking down the street. Did they look for tails or chokepoints or danger? Did people call out greetings to them? If so, who? If not, then what was the typical response? Did people ignore them? Or were they genuinely unseen?

Nara was seen, but it was only other Nara who called out to her. The rest of the village didn’t seem to be able to tell Nara Toshiko apart from any other Nara child. Which said its own truths, of course, but hell if Minato knew what it was yet.

“Done with your observations?” she said halfway into their walk, and with a startle Minato realized that she must have seen his looks out of the corner of her eye. “What do you think?”

Honesty, and vulnerability, or cover and keep his cards close? Nara was a clan kid, if anything happened to her she would be fine. Minato only had himself to watch his back.

She made the decision for him. “I think you really do live up to the name rookie of the year and the label of genius. Maybe not prodigy, we’ll have to see about that one. I think you’re very aware of your space and the people in it, and that you’re ready at all times to be assaulted in the streets.”

Well, when she put it like _that_.

“I think,” Minato said, in the same bland tone that Nara Toshiko had used in her brutal dissection of his own behavior, “that you’re extremely intelligent and extremely lazy. You’re also aware of your own space, but you own it, you walk through it without fear. You don’t watch your back because you know that if anyone messed with you, the wrath of the Nara would come down on their heads. You might be a branch kid, but you’re one of their most promising of our generation – and nothing to say of the things that their Clan Head and Heir let you get away with.”

“Oh?”

There was genuine curiosity there. Point to Minato, then. “Nara-sama wouldn’t let an Academy student representing his Clan to be doing _that_ badly without giving you tutors, pulling you out, pressuring the Academy instructors – _something_. Which means that you’re doing it deliberately, and he knows, and either approves of it or is the reason you’re doing it in the first place. Nara Shikaku plays shogi with you every weekend. He doesn’t show that much interest in anything else in class, other than the Akimichi and Yamanaka heirs.”

“Good points,” Nara said. There was approval in her voice. She was _ten_ , younger than him, teammates with him, and yet she spoke with such – assurance. That was the thing, Minato realized. She spoke like an adult, and spoke to him like he was an adult, too.

Most of the adults – the shinobi – did that these days, because gone were the days when Minato was underestimated for his age. But Nara Toshiko, newly minted genin of Team Seven, was doing it.

She had to know she was doing it. She was frightfully smart, and the Nara were keeping it under wraps – or, wait, no. They were _advertising_ it. Ninja were all about the underneath beneath the underneath. If they were civilians then everyone watching would think her a terrible student and write her off for it. But they were ninja.

Politics, Minato decided. It was all politics and he hated it immediately. Yamanaka had called their team a political match, and it was – putting two clan kids and a clanless prodigy with the Hokage’s student for a jounin-sensei would do that – but there were multiple levels to it.

Did Yamanaka know? Probably not. He spoke to Nara with too much arrogance and anger, caught up in the image she’d built as a poor student. Then she’d gone and provoked him, told him to _keep up_.

What else was she hiding?

“I think this is your stop,” Nara said. They had arrived at the tiny apartment Minato had been given when he’d passed the genin exam. It was in an old building, and the tap always dripped and the windows got stuck when he tried to open them and the laundry machine seemed to break down every other day, but the rent was cheap and that was the most important thing.

Yamanaka, Minato was very sure, would have sneered at his chosen place of living. Nara took it in like it didn’t matter to her, and that was somehow the most refreshing thing she could have done.

“Have you moved in yet?”

“Not yet,” Minato replied. He was going to unpack today, but it would only take an hour or two. He didn’t have a lot of things from the orphanage, and the apartment was tiny; the landlord had called it a studio. “But I will be by the time morning training rolls around.”

“Okay.” Nara eyed him up – and there was the look he’d seen in the classroom, sharp and heavy and weighing and judgmental, except instead of a moment it was here to stay. Minato recognized the look, because he saw it in the mirror. Cost-benefit analysis with the assumption that there was no safety net.

“Call me Toshiko,” she said, and smiled. “Minato-chan.” And then she was gone, down the street and blending into the crowds before he could yell at her about the suffix.

* * *

Minato showed up half an hour early and went through his stretches, his breath misting in front of his face. Yamanaka showed up fifteen minutes later and, after a baleful glare that spoke a lot of how he saw Minato and his own place on their team, started doing the stretches with him.

Nara – Toshiko – showed up ten minutes after that, with five minutes to spare, and walked with the languid grace of someone who was already warmed up and had gone through a round of sparring to wake up their muscles. She always, it seemed, walked liked that. She’d had that same gait, that same stride, on their walk to Minato’s yesterday and today she folded herself down in the grass and put her hands on her knees to meditate.

Or maybe sleep. But she dodged when Jiraiya shunshined out of nowhere with a kick aimed at her head, rolling and rising to her feet in one smooth movement. Not sleep, then.

“Aren’t you supposed to be a pervert?”

Yamanaka choked at the disrespect. Minato felt his own eyes widen.

Jiraiya didn’t deny it. He struck a pose instead, flashy and over-the-top, and his smile sparkled in the dawn light. “Not right now! Today, I am the jounin-sensei who will pass or fail you as genin. If you pass, you’ll be my cute students. If you fail, you go back to the Academy.”

“What?!” Yamanaka shouted. His fists were curled by his sides. His eyes were flashing. If he tried any clan techniques then they didn’t work; Jiraiya continued to smile. His eyes were sharp.

“Makes sense,” Toshiko said, and straightened from her crouch in the grass. “No, shut up and _think_ , Yamanaka. We passed the Academy exam but our status as genin isn’t finalized until next week. How many students graduated from the Academy in the last five years?”

Yamanaka sputtered, but Minato knew the answer. It had come up as part of his research on the Academy when he’d been applying and studying as a student, because he’d wanted to see what the attrition and drop-out rates were. “33, 30, 42, 39, 36.”

“All multiples of three.” Toshiko blinked, slowly and lazily. Typical Nara behavior, even while faced with a jounin and an uncooperative teammate. “What’s the test?”

“Wait, why is the multiples of three important?”

“They’re genin teams,” Minato explained to Yamanaka, because he might be a clan kid who hated Minato’s guts (the sentiment was returned) but he was of average intelligence for his age. He wasn’t the slowest in the class, for which Minato was grateful. “They only pass whole genin teams, and sum of those are always smaller than the size of the class that pass the Academy written test.”

“Well how come they never told us about this at the Academy?”

“Figure that out later, deal with this _now_ ,” Toshiko snapped. She had her arms folded across her chest, but she was Nara. She maintained her poor grades via pencil and paper assessments, not by the taijutsu or ninjutsu training. The Academy teachers had never threatened to fail her out of the year or hold her back, which meant that they were likely in the know about it, too, or had strongly suspected.

 _Politics_.

“You would do well to listen to little Nara-chan,” Jiraiya said. His grin hadn’t fallen at all, but it did sharpen. “Your objective will be to take these two bells from me.” He held them up, hands that had been empty just a moment ago now filled. “Whoever gets a bell will become a genin, and the one who doesn’t will go back to the Academy.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Toshiko automatically replied. “That’s bullshit. Teams always graduate in threes.”

“Ah, but are they from the same year? There are students who score passing grades in the written portion but are held back for some reason or another – medical or such. Sometimes we fill the ranks with them.”

Minato didn’t doubt that what Jiraiya was describing did happen. But neither did he trust the man’s smile. At least Toshiko was truthful when she was insulting someone. Jiraiya did it without thinking, as if it were natural, expected, _habitual_.

He had been a clanless orphan too, Minato remembered, but having the Sandaime Hokage as a jounin-sensei must have ruined him. The backing of a clan must have changed things that much for him. All the more reason for Minato to find the backing of his own and become Hokage. There was little other choice for respect for a clanless shinobi, tokujou or jounin included.

“So, my cute genin-to-be?” Jiraiya’s smile was all teeth. “You have five minutes to plan.”

Jiraiya disappeared in a flurry of leaves. Yamanaka bolted up, whirling on Toshika, who didn’t blink. “You’re a Nara, do your job. What’s the plan?”

What?

“Will you follow directions?” Toshiko asked, all careful blandness and objective curiosity.

Yamanaka puffed up again but caught himself. Minato had theorized he’d learned basic psychology and social engineering as part of the clan curriculum. Maybe Yamanaka Hitoshi wasn’t a complete eleven-year-old idiot boy.

Toshiko laid out a plan, taking advantage of her clan jutsu and Yamanaka’s traps and Minato’s speed. It was simple, brutal, efficient. Yamanaka didn’t stop poking holes into it until the five minutes had elapsed and Jiraiya returned with all the subtlety of a landslide, slamming a water dragon into the center of their planning formation.

The following fight couldn’t even be called a fight. Jiraiya was toying with them, and it was very apparent. He didn’t even make an attempt to hide it. With each following moment, Yamanaka became more and more angry.

But there was a pattern. Jiraiya kept dealing with them in turns, Yamanaka-Toshiko-Minato, Yamanaka-Toshiko-Minato. He was alternating between targets instead of letting all his focus fall onto one.

He was talking with them, too – insulting, bantering, whatever – and even though Minato had been mostly letting it wash over him, the more he talked the more Yamanaka was getting upset, getting sloppy. Hm. Maybe he should start listening again.

“- and at this level? Forget about it. You’ll be lucky if you pass the chuunin exams, brat.”

Ah. That would explain why. “Don’t listen to him,” Minato called out, and ducked under the brace of kunai that Jiraiya had thrown so that he could get Yamanaka to _listen_. The team was as weak as the weakest link. Toshiko was going into this with boredom on her face, she was not the concern, Yamanaka was. “The Academy instructors wouldn’t have graduated us if you couldn’t make it.”

“Ah, but I only have two bells, don’t I? Only two of you will make genin. Even if you get the bells off me, what’s the point? Your chances are two-thirds, Hitoshi-kun. Not great odds.”

Toshiko _yawned_. “I’m only here because my mother said it was the Academy or disownment. I don’t really care. Hitoshi-chan can have the bell if he wants.”

Yamanaka whirled around, eye wide. Jiraiya _hesitated_ – for a split second, caught off guard, but it was there and it was an opening and Minato lunged for it without hesitation and snagged both bells off the man’s belt before Toshiko was yanking him back by the collar of his shirt.

“And,” she said, tone still bored, “I do believe that this is our win.”

Jiraiya paused, holding stance for a moment, before he let his arms fall and his feet resettle. His hair, as long as it was, didn’t seem to have mussed at _all_ , not even after the wire traps or the mud sprays or the impromptu smokescreen that Yamanaka had dropped out of nowhere. “So you’re going to have the two boys pass, and accept the loss?”

“No, of course not.”

Yamanaka sputtered. Minato twisted around to stare and, getting the hint, Toshiko dropped him. Damn, she was _strong_ despite her deceptive lankiness.

Wait.

“I lied, of course,” Toshiko said, and tucked her hands back into her pants pockets, shoulders slumping into their usual slouch. He had never seen her sit or stand straight up ever, not in all the years he’d seen her in the back of the classroom. “Either all of us pass or none of us do. That’s the point of the test, isn’t it? If only two people passed then you’d have your own favored two, and you would work to give them the most openings to snatch the bells from your belt. But you gave us all equal chances, equal opportunities to take the leap. You could have not had your favorites, but everyone does, even on an unconscious level. Minato-chan is a recognized genius and Hitoshi-chan is, on paper, better than me. To a man like you, that would make all the difference.”

To a man like Jiraiya? What did that mean?

“You seem to have me all pinned down,” the jounin said. His face was unreadable. His voice was unreadable.

“With enough data, I can make enough extrapolations.” Toshiko yawned and didn’t bother to hide this one, either, but this one seemed more… false somehow. Did she fake yawning? _Why?_ “So? Pass us all, or fail us all. Your choice, _sensei_.”

Jiraiya let the uneasy moment hang – Yamanaka opened his mouth, Minato stomped on his foot before he could ruin it – but then he smiled, slow and wide. “Very good. Remember, my cute little genin, the Will of Fire. Training is at five AM at this field every day unless you’re told otherwise. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The bells between Minato’s fingers went up in smoke. Jiraiya disappeared in another slurry of leaves. Yamanaka started cursing, long and loud and petty.

Minato rolled his shoulders and looked at Toshiko, who was staring up at the sky. “Well, it’s only a little past noon. Do either of you want lunch?”

* * *

Lunch was interesting. Now that he wasn’t walking away every time that they were annoying him, Yamanaka Hitoshi proved himself an interesting conversation partner. He was an only son, born to two branch members, and he implied that his parents were the high bar he had set for himself. Or that his parents had set for him, it really could be either or. Both his parents were jounin – mother in Field Intelligence, father in the frontline corps.

Nara Toshiko was also an only child but she babysat her cousins often. Her mother had been chuunin and medically discharged from the service. Her father was working in Tactics. No wonder her dream had been to retire with all her limbs intact.

Yamanaka – Hitoshi – left after lunch, satisfied that his new genin teammates wouldn’t hinder him on the path to promotion. Toshiko stayed with him and walked him home again.

Then proceeded to take him up onto the old apartment complex’s rooftop and sit down without fanfare, cross-legged and easy. “You want to be Hokage?”

Minato eyed the ground – the sun was high overhead, but she was facing it, she could snag his shadow but not use hers to attack – and slowly, carefully, sat down.

Toshiko’s eyes were blazing. “Then you need politics. Infrastructure. Diplomatic relations. How does Konoha gets its food? Where do the farmers get their seeds? What are the routes that a shipment takes and what shipping company does it for best, or cheapest, or both? Where does the money from our shinobi corps’ assignments go? How do we get our water? How do we keep up with population increase, where does the housing go? How do we keep up with _economic_ inflation? If there’s a pandemic, how do you handle it? If a person falls sick in the streets, how do they get their healthcare? Who certifies those medical professionals? Who trains them?”

Minato had opened his mouth after the first question, but then Toshiko had kept talking. Belatedly, he closed his mouth.

“If you’re going to be Hokage then these are all things that you need to know about. Not just being the strongest in the village to protect everyone. If you can’t know about all this, then you have to find people who will know about it and advise you on what to do or do it for you. Not just infrastructure problems like these, but military, too – how do you feed them? How do you clothe them? How do you handle border conflict when we don’t want war?”

Toshiko cracked her neck and laced her fingers to crack her spine, all languid feline grace. “Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Minato said, because that was all that he could say. “Will you be my advisor when I become Hokage?”

Finally, that was the thing that surprised her. It was an emotion there-and-gone on her face, but it was the first thing he’d said that had been outside of her calculated parameters for his behavior. “You want me to be your advisor?”

“Well, you just made a good case for why you should be considered.”

“You mean berating a future Hokage-to-be.”

“Advising a future Hokage-to-be about problems that will be relevant and critical,” Minato amended. “The Sandaime’s advisors are his genin teammates, you know. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

No one would call the Homura or the Utatane families _Clans_ , but they were well-respected with the weight of their matriarch and patriarch behind them. Knowing people improved your chances and your opportunities in life, that was why the Clan system _worked_.

Toshiko considered him carefully. “Will you listen?”

She was a Nara. Minato was lauded as a genius but he hadn’t even realized that her laziness and class ranking were carefully maintained as _advertisement_. He’d just thought it was some weird clan thing.

And it was, sort of. It was why he needed a clan kid in his corner. The Sarutobi might be there one day, as the jounin sensei of his jounin sensei, but Sarutobi Hiruzen was also the Sandaime and he needed someone in his corner _now_.

“As long as they make sense,” Minato said, because as desperate for opportunities as he was, he wasn’t an idiot. It seemed like the right thing to say, because she leaned back and put her weight on her hands, palms digging into the rooftop gravel.

“Oh, Minato-chan.” Toshiko’s smile was all teeth, a perfect mimicry of the one that Jiraiya had given them earlier today. “We’re going to be _great_ friends.”


	2. D-Ranks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An update schedule is going to be virtually nonexistent as I am still a university student by day, but I do have this fic outlined for the next five chapters. After that, broad strokes. We'll just have to see how fast I can get these things written, eh?

Training was hell. They repeated everything from the Academy, and either Jiraiya had them drill in shuriken or kawarimi or had them spar until they were literally falling over themselves, or Jiraiya waved them off to do “individual practice” and sat down with his scrolls and inks right there in the middle of the field.

He didn’t let any of them see it, too, all hunched over it as he was.

“Research,” Toshiko explained when the three of them – Team Jiraiya now, technically – were hunched over their own patch of training field, drawing tactics in the dirt. “Fuuinjutsu research, most likely. He either can’t show us for security reasons, or it’s proprietary. Either way, D-ranks tomorrow.”

They hadn’t taken a single D-rank yet. “How do you know?” Minato asked, genuinely curious. Hitoshi had that furrow between his eyebrows that meant he had the same question but was too proud to ask it. He hadn’t figured out yet that Toshiko thought you more of an idiot if you _didn’t_ ask.

“Gossip,” she said now. She was smiling, but it looked off. Minato hadn’t figured out just _how_ off it was yet, but he knew it was. “Eat a big breakfast tomorrow.”

Hitoshi had tilted his head, still confused, but Minato knew that look in her eye. He launched himself backwards as Toshiko did the same, except the shadows were lancing up to tangle the space where he’d been. Startled, Hitoshi managed to dodge, but just barely.

Geta landing on the dirt-drawings of their planned ambush, Jiraiya-sensei put his hands in his pockets, all nonchalant arrogance. “Who told you that you could stand still? It seems to me that you’re not running fast enough.”

That was a warning about the incoming melee if Minato had ever heard one. And like the Academy taught, he had no shame in responding accordingly to a situation with no good options left:

He ran like hell for the edge of the training field and its pre-established rendezvous point.

* * *

“So. It’s been a few days. What do you think our team is supposed to be?”

Minato opened his eyes. Toshiko was still lying down in the training field grass, hands resting over her stomach like she’d come out here explicitly to take a nap instead of being knocked face-first into the dirt by Jiraiya-sensei.

Hitoshi rolled over from his own sprawl on Minato’s other side. There was a red mark on his cheek where Jiraiya-sensei had backhanded him and sent him flying midway through the melee; it was going to bruise spectacularly by the end of the day, the poor bastard. “What?”

“What do you mean?” Minato asked instead, and snorted when Toshiko made a grunting sort of noise in inquiry instead of, for example, actually opening her eyes or answering verbally. Damn lazy Nara. “ _What our team is supposed to be_ is pretty vague.”

“I said what I meant,” she replied. “Why us? And not just for politics, Hitoshi-chan.”

Hitoshi had adjusted poorly to Toshiko’s insistence on using first names, but even he couldn’t argue with a Nara’s logical argument of _team cohesion and synergy building in preparation for missions_. “We’ve our clan techniques,” he said after a moment, with the lack of consciousness about it that still made Minato wince. “You’re tactics, obviously.”

 _Obviously_ , Toshiko mouthed. She opened her eyes and raised her eyebrows, and even here, short black hair sprawled in the dirt and herself looking up to where Hitoshi had pushed himself up onto his knees, she looked as thoroughly unimpressed as she had on their first day together as a team.

“We’re an all-around team,” Minato interrupted, before Hitoshi could snap back in offense. Even a no-holds-barred, knock-down drag-out spar with their sensei hadn’t been enough to beat the easily offended nature out of the Yamanaka. Though Minato understood the temper – Jiraiya-sensei had walked away afterwards, looking for all the world like he wasn’t even _winded_. “You’re long-range, I’m mid, Hitoshi’s close – he has the better taijutsu between him and me, even though his traps let him work close-to-mid.”

Hitoshi closed his mouth with a click, huffed, and reluctantly settled down at the compliment.

“Close.” Toshiko smiled, just a twitch of the corner of her mouth. “Not wrong, but that’s not all of it. Thing about what career tracks we’re on, Minato-chan.”

Sometimes, Minato was reminded that even though he himself was proclaimed as a prodigy, the Nara intellect was on another level in some arenas.

It was Hitoshi that answered her this time: “You’re Tactics, obviously,” he said with the ease of fortunetelling prediction. Not that he was likely to be wrong. Stereotype was stereotype for a reason. “I’m Intel. Minato…”

The Yamanaka looked at him thoughtfully, and Minato resisted the urge to scowl. He only marginally succeeded if the answering baring of teeth from Hitoshi was any indication.

“Frontline shock and awe, or precision strike,” Toshiko offered. “Minato-chan’s got the ninjutsu and theory for it, and the Academy instructors were all praise and predictions of gleeful mayhem about it.”

Minato hadn’t been told about _that_. Did Toshiko know because of her clan connections? Maybe, Hitoshi looked surprised but not _that_ surprised.

“I didn’t steal any intel,” she added. “It’s the logical conclusion. You’re top of the class, Minato-kun. So it’s a threefold reason why they put us together.”

“Clan politics and a pre-built all-purpose chuunin team to throw at any problem,” Minato extrapolated. “We cover our own weaknesses and with you and Hitoshi, if we get in any tight spots we can extract intel and get out. Flexible threat response with me – ninjutsu can either be subtle or showy, depending.”

He was caught going down that rabbit hole – was that why the Hokage had put them with Jiraiya-sensei, one of those who’d been his own genin students? A built-in guard against corruption and an insurance of loyalty, of a team that could do as much damage on behalf of Konoha as it could to it? – when Hitoshi caught the discrepancy: “What’s the third reason?”

Toshiko blinked at the clouds passing overhead, slow and deliberate.

Hitoshi didn’t back down. He hauled himself into a proper sitting position so he could shove an accusing finger in her face. “You just made it up to sound smart, didn’t you?”

Toshiko was eyeing the finger in her face, though, with a glint in her eye that Minato did _not_ like, and he scrambled up to haul Hitoshi back by the back of his shirt in time for Toshiko’s teeth to snap closed around air.

“WHAT THE HELL, ARE YOU AN INUZUKA OR SOMETHING?” Hitoshi screeched.

The Nara, because there was no way Inuzuka blood had snuck into the branch family of the _Deer Clan_ , snorted, rolling over onto her shoulder and then her feet in one smooth motion. “I’ll tell you after our first C-Rank.”

Hitoshi was distracted from his offended examination of his threatened finger, and Minato had to let his teammate go when Yamanaka twisted around to glare at Toshiko. “ _C-Rank_? We haven’t even done our first D-Rank yet!”

“It’s only a matter of time,” she said blandly, and smiled. Her hair was dusty from the dirt she’d rolled around in, her clothing was run as ragged as Minato and Hitoshi’s own, and she had dark smears under her eyes like she’d rather be napping than standing, but in that moment she looked to be the genin that she was. Cocky and confident and vibrantly arrogant, instead of the grim determination that Minato saw when he looked in the mirror.

“And hey, tomorrow’s the start of D-Ranks,” she added when Hitoshi drew himself up, still offended. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll impress Jiraiya-sensei enough to go straight from D to C in a day.”

* * *

Toshiko was both right and wrong. They had their first D-Rank the very next day, and then the day after that, and then every day for a solid two weeks. Training was done either before or after their stint of D-Ranks for the day, and always with the sparring.

Hitoshi complained about the mind-numbing boredom of D-Ranks. Minato agreed with him, if only because it did get boring after a while:

Weeding gardens. Painting fences. Delivering scrolls from one end of the village to the other and then back again. More gardens to weed. Some roofs to fix.

But with every fence he painted and every garden he weeded and every gods damned roof that seemed to leak and needed to be fixed, Minato learned another skill he could use in his own apartment.

“When are we ever going to use this as _ninja_?” Hitoshi muttered under his breath, angry and upset as they walked around the village with yet another missing pet scroll and a time limit. Toshiko was ignoring him, instead seemingly sleep-walking with how low her eyelids had drooped.

Minato himself was distracted by the thought of how he’d use today’s projected pay. He had enough groceries to last the week, but the apartment bill was coming up and if the neighbor’s gossip – he’d started paying more attention after Toshiko’s very dry delivery of _gossip_ as her intel source had proven true – was right, then the landlord would be hiking up the rates at the end of the month yet again.

And it wasn’t like he could even ask Jiraiya-sensei for help. The man kicked their asses on the training field, assigned ninjutsu work that he expected them all to learn through scrolls instead of mentoring, and was there to pick up D-Ranks and file reports afterwards as was a jounin-sensei’s duty… and that was it.

Most of the time, he left them alone.

 _A side effect of having a prodigy for a teacher_ , Toshiko had explained when Hitoshi had complained to her, and her tone had been carefully neutral and she hadn’t looked at Minato as she’d said it (that was a _tell_ , but for what?). _You think that everyone is as brilliant and quick to understand things as you are._

“Stop,” Toshiko said suddenly, even as she stopped dead in the middle of the street. Minato had to quickly backpedal; Hitoshi stopped and turned completely.

Their teammate had closed her eyes entirely, ignorant or ignoring the splitting of the crowd around them like riverwater around a stone, and turned on her heel precisely one hundred and fifteen degrees clockwise: facing something behind them. What did they miss?

“There she is,” she murmured.

Hitoshi blanched and rushed back over. “You can _sense_ her?”

“She’s a _cat_ , you can’t track her by just sight and sound in a village as large as ours.”

Minato was curious about other things, such as, “How do you know it’s Tora?”

“I just do,” she said blandly, and when Hitoshi scowled and Minato exaggerated his confused blinking, she elaborated. “The bright red ribbon is a bit much.”

Wait. “I though you said you _weren’t_ tracking her by sight?”

Slowly, Toshiko smirked. “I never said that.”

“Less talking,” Hitoshi shouted, and oh, he was already half-ducked into the alleyway and probably _scaring off the damn cat_ , “more chasing!”

Minato stared after Yamanaka as he disappeared, his yelling rising above the cat’s own yowling. Toshiko was still smiling as she shook her head and nudged his shoulder with her own.

“Come on, let’s go save him from being mauled to death.”

Shaking himself aware, Minato fell into step with her. “Don’t think you’re getting out of this without a straight answer. And why not worry for Tora? She’s the client’s pet.”

“Oh, I’m sure Tora can take care of herself. I’m more worried about Hitoshi-chan – dogs are one thing, but cats?”

* * *

That was the first thing that Toshiko had been _really_ wrong about, to Minato’s knowledge. Tora was purring in Hitoshi’s arms when they caught up to their teammate, and Hitoshi himself, although he was scowling, seemed as equally pleased when he asked where they had been.

She seemed disgruntled; Hitoshi was triumphant.

Minato laughed, and he felt better than he remembered being in weeks.

* * *

They weren’t the only ones being run ragged with D-Ranks. Toshiko was playing less shogi with Shikaku these days than she’d ever done during the Academy, so their generation’s Ino-Shika-Cho were in a similar situation; Minato hardly ever saw Kushina or her team, she was always with them pulling weeds or throwing each other around in the training fields.

(Hitoshi always dragged him away by the ear when Team Seven and Team Eighteen passed by each other getting on or off the training field, muttering under his breath; Toshiko was snorting too hard with laughter to do it herself.

Minato would be bitter about it, but he got them both back in training himself, so it all worked out.)

But the number of D-Ranks they were taking was good for his wallet. Even with a raised monthly rent, the water pipe bursting on the floor above and subsequent water damage, and the laundry machine eating three socks in a row, Minato felt comfortable enough with his budget that he splurged with takeout instead of having another carefully nutritionally-calculated dinner.

And then came the morning that Jiraiya-sensei refused to take them to do more D-Ranks. “You did all of them,” he said, with the same smirk on his face he’d had on the first day. “The Mission Desk is out of them. Congrats, brats! It’s training for you from here on out.”

“ _Real_ training?” Hitoshi asked skeptically, as Toshiko slowly blinked (she didn’t squint, she’d trained herself out of the obvious tells. Minato and Hitoshi had a bet on what tell was the one for her dodging a question, but neither of them had caught it live yet).

Minato was too busy trying to calculate the hit to his budget to be shocked.

He should have expected it. He should have _seen this coming_ , the genin corps were important but they weren’t _that_ important. It was the first stepping stone to promotion, and there was a reason that genin did manual labor as D-ranks all the time. Weeding and painting fences encouraged a keen eye and observational skills; tracking down wayward pets, stealth and reconnaissance; fixing roofs, balance and agility.

They all had a point, and with their purpose served, Jiraiya didn’t need to hardline them into taking three D-ranks a day, three days a week, every week. They had actual ninjutsu techniques to learn.

So on the one hand, good for promotion; they could start getting the _real_ work out of the way now that they’d built up the patience and the yes-sir attitude of subordinates. On the other hand, Minato was about to go back to only having the genin monthly stipend to rely on for rent _and_ utilities _and_ groceries, and that was going to be a painful line to walk.

Toshiko was eyeing him when he blinked back into awareness, but he couldn’t read the expression on her face. “What did I miss?” he asked instead, because whatever the look meant it felt uncomfortable.

She blinked and it was gone between one moment and the next. “We’re learning tree-walking.”

Well, at least that was actually useful. He fell into step behind Jiraiya-sensei as the man led them to the brace of trees on their training field. His geta clacked unsettlingly in the grass – how did he do that? – but he had a smile on his face as he stared each member of Team Seven in the eye and, without looking away, went horizontal up the tree.

Hitoshi looked bored. Toshiko, oddly fascinated. That was understandable, their jounin-sensei had walked up like gravity had… inverted. Changed direction? Certainly without his footsteps cracking the wood, leaving it untouched as if he’d never been there.

Which was the ultimate point of the exercise, of course. Ninja and all that.

“Now,” Jiraiya-sensei called down, walking off the trunk and onto a low branch of the great oak tree like it was solid ground – and then he leaned backward, _walked_ backward _on the branch_ , and finally came to rest standing upside-down on the branch. His hair was long enough that the very tip of it hanging down was just above Hitoshi’s head, and he was the _tallest_ of the three of them. “It’s your turn. Get on it, kids, we don’t have all day!”

* * *

It took Minato two tries at the concept behind it – chakra on the bottom of the feet to stick them to the tree, strong enough to counteract gravity but nothing special other than that – and then at least fifteen more for the chakra control necessary to walk without leaving craters in the wood behind.

It took Toshiko four tries at the concept, and twenty-eight on the execution. “Taijutsu is literally my weakest,” she defended when Jiraiya-sensei made fun of her for it, and for once she sounded her age: ten years old and embarrassed. Minato could relate. “I don’t have the core muscles required for the horizontal plank while going _upwards_ to do it right off the cuff. And the blood rush to your head, god, are we supposed to just get _used_ to that?”

“There’s a technique for it,” Jiraiya-sensei offered, and then refused to elaborate. Okay, then. Apparently Minato was going to go library-diving again later this week, or at least see who among the older clanless genin or chuunin were willing to give him tidbits.

Hitoshi took the longest of the three of them to properly learn tree walking. “You both are monsters,” he was panting on the third day, after enough attempts and sometimes simply falling down from the trunk that Minato had given up keeping count. “How are you picking it up so damn _fast_?”

“Prodigy.” Toshiko pointed to Minato, and then herself. “Nara. You’re doing well above average, Hitoshi-chan, don’t worry. And this requires good chakra control, which is one of your weaknesses already. No shame about it.”

Hitoshi paused where he was stuck halfway up the tree trunk. At least he hadn’t fallen off it this time, though he was still at least five feet away from the lowest branch of the tree. “How did you know it’s my weakness?”

He sounded – Minato tilted his head and tried to catch a glimpse of Hitoshi’s face where he himself was sitting on his own tree branch, tutoring Hitoshi on the technique. He sounded spooked.

“Your clan techniques are as polished as you could be expected to make them, but your ninjutsu was average compared to the rest of the class. And you always under or overshot the amount of chakra needed whenever you practiced kawarimi during the Academy. You picked up chakra string and trap-setting to compensate and practice control, right? Someone in your Clan probably recommended it to you.”

Toshiko sounded bored, even distracted, as she laid out the logic and the leaps of intuition that no one else would have made. But she was keeping Hitoshi in her peripheral vision even as she was scanning the trees for Jiraiya-sensei, their appointed lookout in the middle of the jounin’s crazy expectations for a team training session.

“Nothing you explicitly did gave it away,” Toshiko added when the silence went on a little too long. She did turn back this time, but there was – a lack of edge in her expression. The muscles around and at the corner of her eyes were relaxed, instead of tense, the definition of what was colloquially called an ‘eye-smile.’ “So don’t worry about it.”

“Information is power, as you well know,” Hitoshi said. Which was something that Minato had been thinking, true, but they were supposed to be a _team_.

Something similar must have been going through Toshiko’s mind, because her eyes sharpened. “You think I’d use it against my own teammate?”

“I think,” Hitoshi replied, stress adding an edge to his own voice, “that if the opportunity came up, you’d side with Minato over me. Two genius peas in a pod, and you’d prefer someone who can keep up with you, right? Basic human psychology.”

Toshiko held the staring contest a moment longer. Then she gestured, and smiled, and said, “But look at you! A not-argument with one of your teammates and the shock of finding out the mortifying ordeal of being known, and yet you haven’t fallen off nor cracked the wood. Impeccable chakra control.”

Hitoshi blinked; then he jackknifed, eyes wide as his feet started peeling off the wood in his surprise. Minato leaned down to grab him, reaching for an arm, a hand, the back of his shirt, _anything_ because that was a ten-foot drop to the ground and Hitoshi was already rattled and Jiraiya-sensei wasn’t _here_ to make a miraculous save like other proper jounin-sensei did and they’d learned how to fall but not fall horizontally off a _tree_ –

Toshiko tossed herself off her branch, came running down the trunk, and grabbed Hitoshi by the wrist to steady him as he stuck himself back to the tree again.

All three of them froze, still stuck in that heart-stopping moment.

Jiraiya-sensei appeared out of nowhere and shattered it like so much glass. He clapped his hands together, beamed an _entirely fake smile_ , and said, “Well done! I have _just_ the thing for you brats to reward you for mastering the tree-walking exercise, too!”

* * *

It was water-walking. Of course it was water walking.

Minato and Hitoshi fell into the river but stubbornly refused to change out of them, because what was the point if they were going to _keep_ falling in until they got the technique down?

Surprisingly, it was Toshiko who got it first. “I refuse to take off soaked layers,” she said when she was done, dripping river water onto the bank and glaring at Jiraiya-sensei. “And I refuse to sit here soaked. Teach me something to dry off.”

Jiraiya’s eyebrows rose. So did Minato’s, and a shared glance with Hitoshi had the both of them going through with their own practice much more slowly and quietly so they could listen in.

There was a single moment – a beautiful moment – where he thought that Jiraiya-sensei would feel some pity and be moved to mercy.

Then he shoved her backwards and Toshiko, surprised, didn’t manage to catch herself in time and went sprawling into the river. She came up sputtering and pissed.

She said, without looking away from a too-amused Jiraiya-sensei, “I’d prefer the D-rank missions over this.”

Minato didn’t temper his startle reaction in time. Hitoshi glanced at him and then back to the showdown, but didn’t say anything.

“As soon as you master water-walking,” their jounin-sensei said with a bared-teeth smile, “it’ll be back to the D-ranks with you, don’t worry.”

And yeah, by that expression the man was planning on driving them just as hard on the D-ranks this time around as he’d done the first time, but at least then Minato would have a _budget_. Just in time, too – there were only so many times that he could make his caloric goal with peanut butter and eggs.


	3. Apartment Hunting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is a little bit fluffy, but don't worry. We'll get to more Plot and Drama next chapter.

All the civilians thought being a ninja was glamorous. Which they well should; this was a military village, and the civilians were farmers and merchants and blacksmiths and restaurateurs and librarians and electricians and all the good nitty gritty things that kept the village running. Minato knew this because the trade schools were always looking to take apprentices, and the orphans with little chakra or small coils or whatever it was that the Konoha-sent medic-nin were looking for could either go to the Academy and wash out embarrassingly within the first week, or hunker down and work hard to make it as a trade apprentice.

Or they could age out of the orphanage and leave the village or pick up dead end jobs to make ends meet, but that only happened to the outer-village orphanages. Closer to the Hokage tower, the pains of budget cuts were more visible. Minato, though, had been doubly lucky: he was dropped off at the orphanage closet to the Academy when his parents died, and he had the raw chakra potential.

Which was why he was here, weeding people’s gardens under the heavy summer sun, sweating buckets on back to back D-Ranks. This wasn’t as glamorous as the civilian rumors made it out to be, partly out of jealousy of people who could walk on trees and partly out of fear of people who could kill them before anyone ever saw it coming, but it was well-paying work.

“Who knows?” Toshiko was saying as she brushed off her knees to haul their third pile of weeds over to the burn bin. “Maybe one of these days we’ll pick up a roofing D-Rank.”

“Good idea,” Hitoshi replied, who burned easier than anyone that Minato had ever seen, and he was including the Hyuga in that. “We can practice water-walking – roof-walking? Chakra control and walking.”

 _It’d be more useful than whatever we’re doing now_ , he didn’t say, but Minato could hear it. Well, it sucked to be Hitoshi, _he_ wasn’t the one who was taking care of the gardens and the herbs.

And then Hitoshi added, “These aren’t even _helpful_ plants!”

At the sound of _more knowledge_ , Minato perked up. “What do you mean?”

“You know my Clan runs a flower shop, right?”

Partly as a way to seem friendly to the civilians, partly because they were a wonderful way to play mind games in any infiltration mission to a region or family that still held to the old ways that taught _flower languages_ , and partly because they were poisonous and-or medicinal like the way the Nara had their forest. Yes. Minato squinted at Hitoshi, trying to will him to explain.

Which he did, eventually, with a smirk. “See these? These are just _weed_ -weeds, not even useful weeds!” Hitoshi brushed back the bush they were gardening around to point out… were those dandelions?

They were edible, and his hair had been compared with enough of the flowers that he was _tired_ of the joke now. Minato glared on reflex, but Hitoshi didn’t take the low road.

“Usefulness is relative,” Toshiko said breezily as she walked back over. “This is Grandmother Ying’s home, Hitoshi-chan, did you really think you’d find, what, foxglove or something here?”

“All the grandmothers in the compound grow foxglove,” Hitoshi replied, as though that were normal. Who knew, maybe it was. Minato only had the village gossip to let him know if that was true, anyway.

Toshiko blinked, then shook her head. “Less talk, more weeding – and _gods_ , Hitoshi-chan, where’s your sunscreen?”

Hitoshi slapped a hand to the back of his neck, startled into reflex, and immediately winced. He must have smacked himself right in the reddened skin that was starting to burn. “We won’t have sunscreen on missions, so we _should_ be getting used to going without it.”

“It’s only a dumb person who doesn’t use the resources that they have.” Toshiko’s hand went to her hip pouches, digging without looking, and Minato got away while the getting was good under the guise of moving to another patch of weeds.

Only the dandelions were there to see him smile when Hitoshi indignantly squawked and sputtered at the sudden cold, but that was fine.

What was less fine was there only being fifteen minutes of bought peace, before he reached the end of this patch of weeds and ran up against the treeline – and found something he hadn’t been expecting to find.

“…why is there a mushroom here.”

He hadn’t meant to say it that loudly, either, but before Minato could turn around and reassure his team they were at his back, leaning over his shoulders. God damn, they were fast when they wanted to be.

“I’ve never seen one like it before,” Hitoshi offered after a moment of looking, and tugged on his gloves before he plucked it off the tree. Minato wrinkled his nose without thining about it – gods, that was _pungent –_ and retreated a half-step when Toshiko did. “Have you?”

Minato wracked his brain for all the pictures they’d been shown at the Academy during Foraging and Acquiring Resources, but that thing had never been in their textbooks nor had the instructors pointed them out during Field Training. Huh.

“It has to be native to Fire Country,” Toshiko said. She was leaning in close enough to brush shoulders. “Grandmother Ying is Fire born and bred – her husband was one of the original farmers who settled here with the Shodaime.”

How Toshiko knew about Grandmother Ying, their D-Rank client for the day, Minato was _not_ going to ask. Often Toshiko knew all the gossip that surrounded their clients, even if she’d never met them in person; if she didn’t know them, then Hitoshi did as a Yamanaka. Between the two of them, Minato was getting spoiled in the amount of intel that they seemingly pulled out of thin air.

“Well if it’s native to Fire Country, _I’ve_ never seen it,” Hitoshi muttered under his breath. He was turning it over in his palms, thumbs brushing over the caps.

And then, in the true fashion of a eleven-year-old who was drunk on the power of being considered a legal adult in the eyes of the Konoha law, he said, “Why don’t we try eating it?”

* * *

Minato did not have a death wish, so he declined sampling the mysterious mushroom. So did Toshiko, because the Nara genes did not skip a generation even if evidently the Yamanaka smarts had.

But Hitoshi eating the mushroom did give them a reason to take Hitoshi home from the hospital after a particularly ear-burning lecture from the medic who _was overworked beyond your tiny mind’s comprehension, don’t you dare waste the time of anyone here with something this stupid ever again_.

If Minato didn’t already have a crush the size of the Konoha mountain on Kushina, Toshiko had teased with a wicked smile on her face over the groaning slumped-over figure of their idiot teammate, he would have developed one on the medic right there.

Either way, all laughter at Hitoshi’s groaning expense ceased when they reached the gates of the Yamanaka compound. The gate guard – _gate guards_ , dear gods, as though this were the gates of Konoha itself – raised their eyebrows. One snickered at Hitoshi’s embarrassed scowl.

“Your teammates? About time you brought them over,” the other one said, and shook his head and smacked Hitoshi upside the back of his when Minato’s teammate made a rude gesture. “Oi, is that any way to treat your favorite cousin?”

“You’re one of _many_ cousins,” Hitoshi muttered. But he did straighten at the reminder of manners. “Sh- shoot, did I need to clear bringing them in with the Clan Head?”

“Nah, brat, genin teammates get a pass.” The other Yamanaka waved them in, and that, it seemed, to be that.

Minato was too busy silently, discreetly gawking at the Yamanaka Compound to listen to Hitoshi’s disgruntled chattering. The Compound was – big. Bigger than the orphanage had ever been, and bigger than what the walled-out district of Konoha had implied. And _all_ the Clans had Compounds as big as this?

“Not all of them,” Hitoshi murmured back, because apparently Minato had whispered his question to himself when he’d been startled out of his mind. “The Noble Clans have more land. But the Ino-Shika-Chou were part of the Founding clans, so we got a lot of land in the Shodaime’s time.”

The other clans hadn’t gotten as nearly as much, Minato remembered. There were something like ten other Clans that weren’t Noble or Founding, who got singular votes at the Village Council. But the Noble Clans had _more_ land than this?

“They don’t always use all of it,” Toshiko explained as Hitoshi got called out to by… cousins? Family? What terms did Clan members use for each other? “The Sarutobi, for example, parceled out some of their land for rent – to private citizens, co-ops, or Village departments – because they just don’t have the numbers to justify all that space.”

But the Noble Clans like Hyuuga and Uchiha certainly had the numbers to justify the space. Damn, even from what the Yamanaka Compound looked like, it was basically a miniature village within the Village. No wonder all the Clan kids had such a head start at the Academy – they were born living and breathing in the basics.

Minato had understood, conceptually and on the intellectual level, just what the difference between a Clan and clanless kid was. But this was… different.

And then Hitoshi ruined the awe and bitterness that had welled in Minato’s throat like bile by hooking his arms through Minato’s and Toshiko’s in a move blatantly copied from their Nara member to drag them to a house that looked like all the others here. “Come on, if I have to suffer through my mother yelling at me then _you do too_.”

Minato was too surprised to sputter or reply, but Toshiko was not. She was as deadpan as ever, though, when she asked with the greatest disdain, “ _Why_? We weren’t the ones to eat the mushroom.”

“Aren’t you the one who’s always going on and on about how we’re a team? We rise together, we fall together, _Toshiko-chan_.”

* * *

Minato was very sure that, in all other situations, Hitoshi’s mother was a very nice person. She was even nice enough to send Minato home with two bags full of leftovers and groceries and _just things I have lying around the house, no don’t you give it back Namikaze-kun, I have plenty more where that came from_.

Because only a Yamanaka could make giving food sound like a threat. The Akimichi would be upfront about it, and the Nara would just slip it into someone’s bag when they weren’t looking.

And so their days went. Sometimes Jiraiya-sensei would stop the flood of D-Ranks to teach them a particularly useful trick or a very basic technique in a shinobi’s arsenal – they spent an entire _week_ on kawarimi, gods, but at the end of it Minato could swap places with a blade of grass twenty paces away.

Other days, they’d go over to someone’s house after the D-Ranks instead of splitting up. At first it was Hitoshi’s house, because his mother had been _excessively_ pleased at _how well you’re getting along with your teammates, Hitoshi-kun!_ And then it had been Toshiko’s home, which had also been in a dizzyingly large Compound with a mother who was _terrifying_ , gods, but at least there had been deer to pet.

But they couldn’t keep going to Hitoshi and Toshiko’s houses forever. Eventually Hitoshi put his foot down, declared that he wasn’t in the mood to put up with his mother’s saccharine smiles that were the prelude to an interrogation (Hitoshi’s exact words), and insisted that Minato hosted them for once.

Which was how Minato led the way to his apartment with a sinking stomach.

Toshiko had walked him home, after their first meeting with Jiraiya-sensei, but she hadn’t come inside. Hitoshi had never visited nor seen the district that Minato lived in, which was standard for all orphan genin and even some regular genin and chuunin who just needed a space to call their own. It was safe because so many shinobi, low-ranking or not, lived there and the civilians who stole or broke into people’s houses were afraid of kunai coming for their throats.

At least he’d remembered to take out the trash and wash the dishes in the sink, Minato consoled himself. That was an improvement over the regular training week when Jiraiya-sensei sent them home at weird hours of the morning or night and Minato was too exhausted hauling his carcass across the village to actually clean up his apartment.

It still felt like he was pulling back the curtain on something dirty when they arrived as his apartment building.

Hitoshi opened his mouth. Toshiko stomped on his foot. Hitoshi closed his mouth.

Minato deliberately, scrupulously did not look back as he led them up the five flights of stairs to reach his corner apartment. His hands did not shake when he slid in his key and turned the lock and had to wrestle with the door hinges for a moment when it got stuck again.

The genin active duty stipend was just enough to cover the rent; as a tiny studio with a half bathroom, the only selling point of this apartment over the others was that it was a corner unit with windows that overlooked the village instead of another building. Minato was actually fairly proud of what he’d been able to do with the place. The futon rolled up into the closet, he had a low table with enough space for his books and scrolls, and the tiny refrigerator took care of his weekly grocries.

And then Toshiko said, in a calm voice that raised all the hairs on Minato’s neck, “…I’m not having you live here like this.”

He turned around slowly to see Hitoshi and Toshiko still standing in the genkan, the former now staring at the latter. Toshiko’s own eyes were up on the ceiling, and Minato followed her line of sight to the water damage. “It’s not that bad.” The plaster had barely peeled off, and ceiling paint would take care of the problem when Minato could finally work that expense into his budget.

“That’s not just water damage, that’s _mold_.”

Okay, that was a bigger issue. Minato squinted at the patch of brown smeared across the ceiling. “Are you sure? The landlord told me it was just a stain.”

“Just because I ate a mushroom doesn’t automatically mean that every new weird thing is mold,” Hitoshi said, only marginally patronizing.

“No, I’m right, that _is_ mold,” said Toshiko, having walked up the walls on her _sandals_ , gods, Minato would have to scrape the dust and mud off his walls later. But she was crouched on the vertical surface like it was a horizontal one and poking at the stain with a kunai. “See?”

She twisted her wrist so that the fleck of _thing_ she’d pried off his ceiling didn’t fall off the tip of her impromptu sampling stick, and Hitoshi leaned in for a single whiff – before he sneezed. “Okay, no, you’re right, that’s mold.”

Sometimes Minato could not believe that these were his teammates. “And you _breathed it in_?”

“You’ve been breathing it in for however long you’ve lived here, and you haven’t died yet.” Hitoshi shook his head and looked around Minato’s apartment again, who was avoiding the urge to shove them out the door with every single bone in his body. Was it just him, or was it _warm_ in here?

“Who wants to go on a field trip?” asked a voice from behind, and Minato barely managed to refrain from stabbing his teammate by a hair’s width. Toshiko didn’t show how close she’d come to getting a kunai through the neck, though she did back up a half-step when Minato had whirled around in his startle. “Minato you should be there, this is your apartment. Hitoshi-”

“A _Nara_ yelling at someone else?” Hitoshi snorted and pushed his way past both of them. “This, I’ve _gotta_ see.”

* * *

“I didn’t like that landlord.”

“Why?”

Hitoshi scowled and chomped down harder on his post-meeting-with-the-landlord dango than was necessary. “He was rude.”

“Really?” Toshiko raised her eyebrows. She seemed surprised. “I thought he was perfectly nice.”

“Did you grow up learning how to read the body language off a man at twenty paces?” There was momentary silence; Hitoshi sniffed haughtily in it. “I thought not. He was rude, Toshiko-chan, and I don’t like him.”

The way he’d said _Toshiko-chan_ wasn’t sarcastic at all. Hitoshi didn’t seem to notice it; a glaring slip-up, but Toshiko hadn’t said anything and Minato wouldn’t either. Not yet, at least.

“Okay, then that’s all the grounds I need to find Minato a better apartment.”

…wait, what?

“Why not just have him move into your house?”

“First of all, my mother would kill me,” Toshiko replied serenely, as if they weren’t discussing someone who, even with a prosthetic from left knee down, could move absolutely silently. If Toshiko’s mother wanted someone dead, they would never see her coming. “Second, it’s against Clan rules. Genin teammates get leeway, but not _that_ much leeway.”

Hitoshi grunted as if that made perfect sense. “Ugh, same here. The usual marriage-or-blood laws, right?”

“Yeah.” Toshiko sucked in her cheeks and bit on them in thought.

Minato was still lost, but if he had heard right – “Are you _volunteering_ to help me go apartment hunting?” They were _Clan kids_. He doubted they would even know what to be looking for, let alone work within a budget or negotiate a landlord down from their asking price to something that was more reasonable to offer a Konoha genin.

Hitoshi raised his eyebrows. Toshiko gave Minato the classic Nara look that said _You’re an absolute idiot_. Which, did they teach that in whatever classes the Nara had when they were teaching their Clan techniques?

That thought carried him for the next half-hour as Toshiko and Hitoshi argued apartment requirements and landlord qualifications over his head. “Look, I’m not saying that all landlords are bad,” Hitoshi was saying when Minato tuned back in. “But it’s like any other job! They should have references!”

“From previous tenants?” Toshiko shook her head. She was spinning her now polished dango stick between her fingers, but it was only a sliver of bamboo, it wouldn’t actually deal fatal damage unless she opened up someone’s artery. “You’d never get them to agree.”

“Where are we going?” asked Minato, who had finally figured out what district of the Village they were in. They were still in the eastern residential district – Toshiko must have talked Hitoshi out of the more expensive central district, where prices soared due to its proximity to the hospital and the Hokage’s Tower – but they were towards the center of it now. “Wait, there aren’t any apartments available here.”

Hitoshi and Toshiko stopped in their tracks, and Minato had to do a quick one-two step shuffle to avoid colliding with them. They turned to give him another _look_ , and he quickly elaborated: “Apartments here are chuunin and jounin only, they _check_. And they’re too expensive, which is how they reinforce it.”

Minato had calculated it once out of curiosity. Paying for a one-bedroom in that area split between three people, let alone a _studio_ , was barely possible on a genin’s pay. He would never find someone willing to give him an apartment to himself, or find roommates when the rest of his graduating class hated his guts for being rookie of the year and the upper years already had their housing situations squared away.

He didn’t mention that to them, though, because his current teammates were Clan kids. They didn’t need to do the budgeting song and dance and pray that the D-Ranks of the week would pay for groceries and that the market stall owners who saw him coming didn’t mark up the prices _too_ much.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” Toshiko said again, and put her dango stick away so that she could neatly roll up her sleeves. “Clearly they’ve never been told that that’s discrimination based on rank, which hasn’t been legal since the Nidaime’s reign.”

“No, I think that’s technically legal,” Hitoshi added thoughtfully, “since otherwise this would’ve come up during Village Council meetings.”

“That’s true, don’t some of your cousins live around here?”

“Some of the older Akimichi genin who moved out, too.” Hitoshi leveled a look at Minato, as though it were his fault that he hadn’t been able to convince the landlords to take him on as a tenant.

“Let me rephrase,” he said past the ringing in his ears. “Clan genin can lease apartments here, but clanless and orphan genin can’t.”

Hitoshi blinked first. Then he sighed, managing to communicate _this entire thing is a ridiculous endeavor,_ and for a moment Minato doubted just which clan Hitoshi had come from.

“That’s even more illegal!” Toshiko chirped, apparently completely forgetting that she was supposed to be a Nara and thus allow Minato to continue squeaking out rent for his crappy apartment on a genin’s pay because she was too lazy to do anything. “Guess what we’re fixing even before you reach Hokage status, Minato-chan?”

* * *

If Hitoshi disliked Minato’s current landlord, he absolutely _loathed_ the potential ones that they managed to dig up in their first pass at apartment hunting.

“ _How are they all idiots_ ,” he hissed, as he dragged Minato around by the wrist. With the way that the sun had set two hours ago one would have thought that his genin teammates would have given up on this endeavor after the first or second landlord – this was not, after all, their problem.

Toshiko was slouched, her neatly rolled up sleeves baring her _very obvious_ kunai bracers (which had honestly done more to intimidate the primarily civilian landlords with a tenth of the effort that Hitoshi had put into his act, the classic Nara laziness-prompted efficiency move) but she was still leading them toward their tenth apartment tour of the day. Which were walk-ins, even though Minato was very sure these landlords usually only provided tours by appointment.

“Don’t worry about it,” she was telling Hitoshi now. There was no trace of fatigue in her tone. “Rather, we should return Minato-chan to his apartment and pick this up again tomorrow.”

“Why?” Hitoshi huffed out. “I told you, I didn’t like that landlord!”

“Nothing to be done for it right now. We can keep searching. And we can expand our search parameters,” she added with flutter of her eyelids, “when we don’t have training tomorrow at the crack of dawn.”

Hitoshi paused. This time Minato did crash into his genin teammate, but he was too busy trying to reboot his brain from the realization that, yes, it was past the usual hour he went to bed in preparation for Jiraiya-sensei’s _ridiculously early mornings_.

“And besides,” Toshiko said when she and Hitoshi marched Minato up to his apartment like particularly stubborn bodyguards, grinning at the Yamanaka. “I have the perfect district in mind for Minato-chan’s new apartment.”

* * *

Toshiko did, in fact, manage to find him an apartment in his budget that didn’t have a terrible landlord nor mold hand-waved as water damage.

It just so happened to be with a _Clan_ landlord. Which meant that he had Akimichi and Yamanaka and Nara for neighbors, with Aburame and the occasional other minor clans lurking on the floor above or below.

It was also the same building as Kushina’s, which he knew because the girl had kicked open her door in the morning on her way to her own team training, and Minato’s own team, who had been helping him move, did not move to help him up when he startled himself into dropping all the boxes he’d been carrying.

“I’m going to _throttle_ you,” he’d whispered to them, but alas. They just continued to laugh at him, the _jerks_.

At least they’d gotten him the corner unit. It had similarly large windows as his old apartment – _makes for terrible security_ , Toshiko had muttered under her breath, and Hitoshi had snorted back _we’ll make that terrible sensei of ours carry his weight and secure the blonde idiot’s apartment_. If they’d said anything after that, Minato hadn’t been listening. He’d been too busy admiring the view, which was even _better_ here.

Plus the hospital was close by, and so were the markets, so he wouldn’t have to carry groceries home on aching arms for seven blocks or more.

“My cousin’s just down the hall,” Hitoshi said as he carried over the last box of things, a wicked grin on his face.

Minato was going to get harassed _so hard_ by the Clan kids who thought Minato was the absolute scum beneath their shoes for being just as good, if not better, than them. But Toshiko was mightily pleased with herself, and beneath the teasing even Hitoshi’s shoulders were looser, less tense, now that he’d gotten Minato where he wanted him – in a new apartment.

Team cohesion, Minato told himself. Synergy. Building up a foundation of trust and understanding now would only aid them in future missions when they would need to read the _thoughts_ off each other mid-battle. That was the only reason they were helping him.

And yet despite himself, he found himself smiling when Hitoshi set down his housewarming gift on Minato’s brand-new kitchen table: a healthy cutting of lily of the valley.

“I’m asking him for any and all embarrassing stories of you,” he told Hitoshi, because he couldn’t get the _Thanks for helping me move_ or even the more general, less dangerous _Thanks_ out of his throat. “You too, Toshiko-chan, don’t think I didn’t see that Nara chuunin in the hallway you were whispering with.”

Hitoshi looked up from where he was fussing over the plant, eyes unreadable. Behind him, Toshiko glanced over from where she was organizing _her_ own housewarming gift of meal-prepped portions fit for a week.

They didn’t say _You’re welcome_ , but after a moment of – silence, acknowledgement, ten and eleven year olds who already knew the weight of an act like this – Toshiko threw a dishrag at Minato’s head – which, what, where did that come from?

“I have no embarrassing stories,” she said regally. “And even if I _hypothetically_ did – well, Kushina-chan is your neighbor, isn’t she?”

“I wonder,” Hitoshi added, clearly picking up on this _diabolical plan that Minato needed to stop immediately_ , “if she’d be interested in any of our stories from training?”

“Don’t you two _dare_ -”

**Author's Note:**

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